BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION

By Barbara Sutton

Published: May 27, 2001

YOU THINK YOU HEAR

By Matt O'Keefe.

Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $23.95.

For a young band seeking college radio air play, the cross-country road tour is a necessary evil. But when you consider how much time these people must be willing to spend together in a van, you might wonder whether the band is simply their excuse for driving from one club to the next to sample the mixed nuts and luncheon meats provided in the dressing room spreads. This is just one of the thoughts we get to chew on in Matt O'Keefe's first novel, ''You Think You Hear.'' Lou Farren becomes a roadie for his college friends, whose band totters on the brink of stardom. Like Lou, the principals of the Day Action Band -- Tim, Joey and Cree -- still live in a college-informed universe several years after graduation. This owes partly to the fact that students constitute their bread and butter, but also to their fear of a universe in which you can't play hackey sack at will, fling slices of ham at a wall or make things with the candle wax at expensive restaurants. Lou, our ironically detached guide on this trip from Delaware to Los Angeles, knows his primary purpose is to sell T-shirts. He also seems to know that the tour will be a rite of passage as he attempts to do something about his unrequited love for Cree and find some degree of nobility in being a person in the music world who doesn't make music. Lou has enough wit, insight and warmth to keep us entertained; the problem is that Lou's narrative is so omniscient as to foretell an epiphany before he even gets started. And whatever he does learn about himself and the band members never goes farther than his own thought bubble: per the code of the van, you can share a joint, or your initial impressions about Tom Petty and Rush, but anything more is simply uncool. Barbara Sutton